Notre Dame, graduation speakers, abortion, and tentacle rape

Graduation speakers are always a tricky issue. The year I graduated college, they picked some speaker no one wanted to hear, and then shortly before graduation she died (or got sick, I forget which), and they replaced her with someone else no one wanted to hear. And yet, we all showed up, sat in the sweltering 100-degree heat for hours, passed around a bag of wine, and enjoyed our heatstroke. A couple of years earlier they’d brought in History’s Greatest Monster as the speaker and still everyone showed up.

Kids these days are a little pickier, it turns out, and some Notre Dame seniors are skipping their graduation on account of graduation speaker Barack Obama.

No, they don’t like that he’s pro-abortion. I guess this shouldn’t be too surprising, as being weird about sex is a pretty intrinsic part of Catholicism. This is, of course, described in the book:

The Catholic Church has extreme views on sex, arguing that it is permissible only between married couples, and only for the purposes of procreation and (occasionally) revenge. Accordingly, Catholics are prohibited from using condoms (even in Swaziland), from getting lap dances or table dances (even at The Pink Pussycat), from commissioning Mother-Teresa-simulacrum RealDolls, and from mentally undressing priests.

In addition, Catholics are adamantly opposed to abortion, even in the case of tentacle rape, arguing that life begins at the instant of conception, and that an eight-cell, half-tentacle zygote has just the same “right to life” as you do. (If you point out that some huge proportion of conceptions end in spontaneous abortion, Catholics will usually either blame this on Satan, argue that abortion is actually acceptable “when god does it,” or pretend that they only understand Latin.)

In any event, I am looking forward to President Obama’s speech. I’m kind of hoping that he’ll offer to pay my mortgage.